The Case Has Altered Read online

  Back with Jury, he said, “He thinks it was a length of material, a scarf perhaps. She was garroted. Beyond dumping her in the canal—or she could simply have fallen in after death—no attempt was made to hide her.”

  Jury looked behind him at the Visitors’ Center. “Is this open now? Middle of February? I expect in the warmer weather there’s quite a lot of tourists.”

  “It’s open, yes; that is, would be, if we weren’t shutting it down.” Bannen looked off into the distance. “The fen is about halfway between Fen-gate and—” He turned to look behind him. “—the pub where she worked some nights. Just away off there on the main road. Called the Case Has Altered. . . . Um.” He ran his thumb across his forehead, reflecting.

  “You don’t appear especially surprised.” Jury thought Bannen probably never appeared surprised.

  He turned to look at Jury out of his cool gray eyes, smiling slightly. “Oh, I’m surprised. Yes. I’m surprised she was strangled. Verna Dunn was shot.”

  “Killed by the same person, you mean?”

  Bannen turned his head slowly to regard Jury. “This is Lincolnshire, not London. That we would have two murders in the space of two weeks, both targeting women from one house—” He shook his head. “Yes, it would be hard to think two killers were moving about the fens.” He ran his finger under his collar as if the collar was too tight. “Usually it’s the same method. When one’s compelled to kill, it would be in such a way and by such means as would relieve some sort of anxiety . . . You think that’s funny?”

  “You sound like a psychiatrist, Chief Inspector. I expect I don’t believe much in solving murders with mind-games. Basically, it’s all plodding—” Jury caught himself, thinking, My God, I’m beginning to sound like Chief Superintendent Racer: “It’s one foot in front of the other, police work is, Jury; it’s plodding, Jury, not your slippery-minded conundrums. . . . ” And here he was with this detective chief inspector, whom he hardly knew, and who had, clearly, solved cases in just the way he said—or he wouldn’t be saying it. Why was Jury adopting this condescending manner?

  Yet Bannen didn’t appear to take offense. Perhaps he thought there were more important things to think about. He looked around him at Wyndham Fen. “It was all like this once.” Bannen looked at the ground, at the wet grass and the scarves of silver cobwebs stretched across it. With his foot he separated the tall reeds. A field mouse skittered off. “I’m driving along to the Wash now, to have another look. I expect you might like to see it.”

  Jury was surprised by the invitation. “Yes. I certainly would like to.” He wondered if Bannen were, indeed, soliciting the help of Scotland Yard. The Wash had been the site of the first murder.

  “There’s a public footpath that borders this part of the fen, and she probably took that because it goes right past Fengate.” He turned his head to the tree above them, where starlings whicked upward from the branches and knit a black pattern across the whitening sky, then vanished in the seconds it took to mark their flight. Bannen watched them. “Always makes me feel rather sad, the flight of birds.” Then he continued talking about the footpath. “On the other end, it passes the Case Has Altered. The Owens were surprised she had this job moonlighting. Is that what they call it? Moonlighting?” He smiled. “Pretty word.” Bannen scratched his neck again, seeming to afford this point as much deep thought as any other that had come up that day.

  They turned from the drainage ditch and made their way back along the boardwalk to the small car park.

  Bannen said, “My sergeant is down with some godawful allergy. He’s violently allergic to whatever the stuff is that comes off the alder and hazel trees.”

  Jury smiled. “Your sergeant would get on with my sergeant like a house afire.”

  “Oh? Is he allergic to the stuff?”

  “He’s allergic to all stuff.”

  • • •

  You can see the difficulty,” said Bannen, with his characteristic gesture of rubbing a thumbnail across his brow. As if he’d spent the last two weeks seeing the difficulty.

  Jury could believe it. They stood together on the saltings, looking out over that part of the Lincoln-Norfolk coast called the Wash. The public footpaths only went so far, stopping before the seawall. They had walked farther—up over the seawall and down again. Bannen had said there was no danger here of quicksand, as there was much farther out. Like an interior shoreline, the saltings, composed of mud and silt, stretched to meet sand that formed the protective barrier between land and sea. Bannen had pointed out the narrow, choked end of the River Welland where it ran no wider than a stream, into the waters of the North Sea.

  There were a number of “danger” areas, legacy of the war. “Mines,” said Bannen. “The Wash is littered with them.” He pulled the collar of his windbreaker tighter. “This is where we thought the invasion would come.” He nodded toward the North Sea. “There were gun platforms out there, big things, like oil rigs, garrisons with heavy artillery. Still there, some of them.”

  Jury looked at him, speculatively. “ ‘We’? You weren’t in that war, surely. You must have been a kid.”

  Bannen smiled. “I was, but old enough to remember how the beaches were mined, and we weren’t to get near them.” They stood in silence for a minute. Then Bannen said, “Difficult. Our M.E. put Verna Dunn’s death down to between ten the night of February first to one A.M. the morning of the second, Sunday. Though she wasn’t found until afternoon. So the body’d been lying here in all of this muck. Hellish cold and windy. Brutal.” He made it sound as if Verna Dunn had been alive to suffer through this exposure. “She might not have been found at all if the sands had shifted a certain way. They do, you know. We’re still finding wrecks, hulls of ships. Over on Goodwin sands they found the propeller of one of the Sword bombers. Sand covered it up for all of these years.”

  “You think that was her killer’s intention? To bury the corpse?”

  “I would do, only it’s a bit iffy. He might have been counting on high tide. Spring tide’s twice as high, and if you noticed the seawalls behind us”—Bannen hooked his thumb back toward the walls—“that’s one of the reasons for them. Neap tide—low tide—comes twice a month and the moon was in third quarter that night. It’s the pull of the moon . . . ” Bannen grew contemplative.

  Jury held up his hand, palm out. “You’ve lost me.”

  “One simply has to look at the tide chart. I did. The killer might have been planning on high tide, the tides and the sand. But he must have miscalculated. Tide wasn’t all the way in when the body was found.” He rubbed his thumbnail across his forehead. “That’s the trouble with murder, wouldn’t you say? Counting on the moon?”

  Depressed as he was, Jury wanted to laugh. “Somehow I can’t imagine Jenny Kennington counting on the moon. And the thing you seem to be forgetting is that counting on it implies a great deal of calculation, not impulse.”

  Bannen smiled slightly. “Oh, I’m not forgetting, no.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “Coastguard. Otherwise, God knows when she’d have been discovered. I mean this isn’t Skegness by a long chalk. As I’ve said, this area was heavily mined in the war and a lot of mines went missing. Shells, too. The danger areas are clearly marked. Nobody’d be strolling along the Wash for the pleasure of it. It was quite deliberately chosen.” Bannen paused. “I narrowed time-of-death down a little more because I think it’s quite a reasonable assumption to say she must have been shot between ten-thirty Saturday night and twelve-thirty early Sunday morning. It was close to one A.M. when the gardener said he’d seen her car parked at the end of the driveway, and it would have taken at least fifteen minutes for whoever drove to get back. No one heard the car return.” Bannen sighed.

  “No one at Fengate called when she didn’t come back to the house with Jenny Kennington?” Jury frowned.

  “Oh, I expect someone would have done, only, you see, they thought she’d simply taken it into her mind to drive off, or even drive bac
k to London. Since she wasn’t with Kennington, they just made that assumption—that she’d driven off. She was like that, apparently, Verna Dunn. Very mercurial, very impulsive. And here she lay.” Bannen bent down and scooped up another handful of silt. “You can imagine what it’s like trying to find anything in this stuff. My men were down on hands and knees, must have gone over a good quarter mile. Well, you can’t cover the whole area, I mean, look at it. A bullet could have traveled for half a mile down there.”

  Jury followed his gaze across the shining mud, starry with reflections from the weak sunlight. “Yes, I can see that. Wind doesn’t help, either, does it?”

  “Infernal banshee-winds.” He dusted the shale from his hands and shoved them in his coat pockets. “We found a casing pretty much buried, one in the victim.” He looked behind him. “Cartridge from a .22 rifle.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “The shell, the gun, the car—? I’d say that’s quite a lot.”

  “You mean you matched the bullet to a gun?” Jury was getting more anxious moment by moment. They did have a lot.

  “Max Owen’s. He’s the owner of Fengate. Jennifer Kennington was the Owens’ guest, as I’ve said.”

  Jury looked away, out to sea, said nothing.

  “There are a surprising number of rifles standing about in the vicinity of Fengate. We gathered up four. Owen’s, Parker’s, Emery’s—Peter Emery’s a kind of groundskeeper for a Major Parker. Emery’s blind but that doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t have used his rifle. So we got them all. Oh, and Jack Price even had one. He’s an artist, a sculptor or something like that. Why would he need a rifle? And how they all managed to get licenses for these guns, I’ve no idea. You know how difficult it is. Except for Emery, of course, they’re all fair shots, Parker especially.”

  “You haven’t mentioned the women. Somehow, I can’t see Jenny Kennington getting off a shot. I don’t think she’s ever handled a gun in her life.”

  “Afraid you think wrong, then. She used to go out with her husband occasionally, and Price along with them.” Bannen studied the shifting expressions on Jury’s face. “You didn’t know she knew this man Price before?”

  All Jury could muster for an answer was the briefest of headshakes.

  Bannen pursed his lips, blew out breath in a soundless whistle. Mildly, he said, “You thought you knew her perhaps better than you knew her.”

  “Apparently.” The Jenny he had fantasized about was a Jenny who, in awful trouble, blurted everything out. Well, why in hell hadn’t she blurted it out? Because he was one more copper?

  “. . . tire treads.”

  Jury had been only dimly aware that Bannen was speaking of the Porsche.

  “It did narrow things down a bit. Verna Dunn’s Porsche had distinctive treads. The car, with Dunn in it, presumably, and with a passenger—whom of course they assumed to be Jennifer Kennington, but she says not—at any rate, the car drove off about ten-twenty or so—which is when the Owens and Parker heard a car. Price had gone to his digs, his studio, he calls it, and heard nothing.”

  Jury hunched down in his coat, wishing they could leave this place. The water was lead gray, and looked just as heavy. The sensation Jury felt in his chest was like descriptions he’d heard of heart attacks, or the premonition of one. The intractable wind, the sand, shale, and mud served only to remind him of his powerlessness. But he went doggedly on, trying to convince Bannen—or himself—that Jenny Kennington was the wrong suspect. “You assume Verna Dunn had a passenger. But you don’t know that.”

  “If she didn’t, then how did the Porsche get back to Fengate?”

  The question was rhetorical. Of course, he was right. Jury said, more to fill the alien air with words than anything else, “But now there’s this Reese woman dead. How can you link Jennifer Kennington to that? Was she here?”

  “She went back to Stratford-upon-Avon on the Tuesday—that would have been the fourth—after Verna Dunn was murdered. Stratford, of course, is only a two-hour drive from here.”

  What he implied was not lost on Jury, who had no answer.

  “Seen enough?”

  To last the rest of my life, Jury thought, looking across the Wash and to the North Sea. On the horizon, a black ship hung motionless.

  “You can see the difficulty,” said Bannen, again, running his thumb across his forehead.

  3

  The two miles between the fen and Fengate were as empty as a map of the Hereafter. No woods, no hedge rows, hills or spinnys. The only dwelling Jury could see was a house far in the distance whose front sat behind tall, thin trees that looked more like bars than trees, straight and evenly spaced. And even this was much like a mirage that remains at the same distance no matter how much closer you think you’re getting. Jury felt a little like a runner always running in place; they drove but seemed to get no nearer, in the way that one never succeeds in gaining on illusion.

  Jury could not imagine himself living in such a country. The quality of the light added to this static dreamlike landscape, for it made the scene appear almost translucent—a light behind frosted glass. “Is it all like this, this flatness? It seems to go on forever.” They had at last passed the farmhouse behind its row of pencil-thin trees. Not an illusion, after all.

  “Lincolnshire?” Bannen turned to look at him. “Oh, no. No. You’ve got the wolds, haven’t you, farther north? A lot of people don’t like South Lincs, they find it bleak. Too much of a sameness.”

  Bleak it was. No place to hide.

  “Fengate is buried in its own little copse. Used to be a virtual wood.” Bannen sighed. “But there again, we’ve lost our woods, haven’t we? Land was needed for crops. Fens were drained for farming. I expect the land had to be managed to sustain human life, but one begins to wonder—will the fens be managed right out of existence? They’re a new aristocracy, the farmers. They have the land and that gives them power. You can see how the soil is, unbelievably rich and black. In Cambridge, they’re called the Black Fens because of that rich soil.” He sighed. “They don’t plow the fields with horses; it’s tractors now.”

  Jury smiled. “Tractors—that’s pretty low-key and hardly newfangled. You’re waxing romantic, aren’t you?”

  “Um. Yes. I expect so.” But he seemed not to care if Jury found him romantic or found him anything else.

  A few cottages straggled by before they turned onto one of the narrower B roads. Jury said, “I can’t see Dorcas Reese walking all this distance to go to the Case Has Altered. Didn’t look the athletic type to me.”

  “She’d have taken the public footpath. That cuts off a mile, you see.”

  And then, as Bannen had said, they came to trees and a road—rough but graded—leading back through the trees.

  Fengate was a large but architecturally unimposing house, flat-fronted and square, of no discernible period. It was more stout and sturdy than it was delicately cressellated or turreted; it might have graced the pages of a study on yeomanry. Bannen had suggested what it looked like: the house of one of those “aristocratic” farmers. Behind it and to one side was a large outbuilding that might have served as garage or barn. It had been converted to a dwelling, to judge by the painted window boxes and yellow door.

  Bannen stopped the car in a circular drive that enclosed a bed of early-blooming crocuses. An elderly man, presumably the gardener, was tending them. He stepped over to the driver’s side after Bannen called to him, leaned down, and pulled at the tip of his cap with his fingers by way of a greeting.

  “Are Mr. and Mrs. Owen here, Mr. Suggins?”

  “Not him, no suhr. Said what he had to go up t’London.” The look on Mr. Suggins’s face was almost sad, as if that’s the sort of thing these landowners got up to. When Bannen introduced Jury—“Scotland Yard CID”—Mr. Suggins stepped back from the window rather smartly. Scotland Yard! This was an altogether different kettle of fish.

  “Would you tell her—Mrs. Owen, I mean—I’d like a word with her.” Bannen and J
ury got out of the car. Mr. Suggins, seemingly at a loss as to what to do with an unexpected visit from both Lincoln and London police, pulled off his cap and motioned them up the front stairs. There was apparently little standing on ceremony or place, for Mr. Suggins preceded them through the front door.

  Once in the large entrance hall, he took his leave, saying he would search out Mrs. Owen, and that he would send “the missus” in to them in the meantime. Again he snapped his cap brim by way of taking his leave.

  “Who’s ‘the missus’?” asked Jury.

  “Cook. Senior of the staff, I expect. Not that there’s much staff, considering the size of the place; cook, maid, kitchen helper—well, that was Dorcas, who did both—then Suggins, who does the grounds, and another chap to help Suggins. He looks a bit arthritic, I’d say. Max Owen is certainly rich enough to keep a dozen servants if he wanted. Look at that chest over there, would you?” Bannen nodded toward an elaborately lacquered domed chest or trunk. “Cost me several months’ salary, that lot would.”

  “You know antiques, do you?”

  “No. Max Owen pointed it out to me. Says he’s not sure what it’s worth because he’s suspicious of the lacquering. Needs to have it appraised, he says.” Bannen shook his head again. “Imagine being able to put out nine or ten thousand quid for one piece of furniture, and not even a practical piece, at that.” Bannen dolefully regarded the chest, apparently imagining what he could buy with the nine or ten thousand. “That’d buy me a three-piece suite several times over, wouldn’t it you?”

  Jury smiled. The homes of the rich, a number of which he’d seen, didn’t register on Jury in terms of what use he could put the money to. Oh, yes, he could certainly do with more money, but the belongings of others were interesting only in terms of what they said about their owners. To what lengths would they go to get them or keep them?